At 11:51 AM 1/28/99 -0800, you wrote:
>Dear Deb, You've given me quite a bit to think about. Since the museum
>where I currently work is on the UIC campus, I have easy access (and it's
>free!) to both the Education Dept. here and the Masters in the Teaching of
>History program here. Since I know some of our professors here at UIC, it
>certainly seems worthwhile to at least start talking to them and get a feel
>for their responsiveness.

Great!  I had a friend that did the MAT program at James Madison University
when I was doing the M.Ed middle-school program.  We had overlap in the
advanced grad ed classes like research methods and philosophy of ed.  I
took more ed methods courses and he look grad history classes.  Since you
already have a master's in history, you might just want to do the post-bac
teacher's ed program which will get you all the teacher training classes
and student teaching that is required for certification but it's not a full
master's.  Ed grad classes are usually centererd around statistics and
research which are interesting and useful if you want to do visitor surveys
and evaluate the effectiveness of your ed programs but aren't really useful
for everyday museum ed.

Even if you don't go all the way with certification or another master's,
taking the basic education courses will certainly be benefical.  You also
need to think about degree overkill.  You've got almost 10 years of
experience in a museum with a master's in your subject field which are
hossy qualifications right there.  I wouldn't think another master's would
make that much of a difference between a post-bac program.  Plus it would
take less time to accomplish.

What would look really good is if you took some basic ed classes and
methods classes and then developed an ed program for your museum based on
what you've learned.  I can't remember if you said you were already doing
some museum ed or not or if your museum had an ed program.

Anyway, I seriously opt for a UIC program over a distance one since it's
already free.

Good luck!

Deb

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